Category Archives: BlazBlue

I am not a huge fighting game fan, but when I decided to take the plunge and buy Calamity Trigger I was surprised to say the least. Now that Continuum Shift has released I decided that I should probably pick up this one as well. Blazblue -Calamity Trigger- is 1.0, Calamity Trigger Portable was 1.5, but can we say Continuum Shift is 2.0? Will new characters and game modes make you feel that it was worth purchasing a new game or will does it feel like it should have merely been some dlc? Well let’s find out.

Oh and you may have noticed I purchased this on the PS3. You may be asking yourself why, what makes this better on the PS3 over the 360. Well the reason is that I like using the d-pad for fighting games, and the 360’s d-pad is absolutely horrible.

Visuals:

-Menus: The menu is very different from the first game. Rather than having a left and right scrolling menu as we did in the first game, we now have a list style menu. While it is not as decorative as the first, it is sleek and functions a bit better.

-Characters: The same sprites are used during battle so you know they still look gorgeous. Outside of the fight the character portraits have received a rather hefty tweak. I am 50/50 on the new art style. No I am not saying its bad by any stretch, in fact they look amazing. It think the portraits look both better and worse at the same time. The characters now look somewhat younger and it almost feels like they would have been used in the first game rather than in this one. I must say that some characters look much nicer. All in all I still love the character portraits. Atleast they don’t look god awful.

-Gallery: There is a gallery mode placed so you can oggle at pics of Noel and Rachel.

-Replay Theater: Yes you can actually save videos of matches you played against the computer or people online. This is a feature I can really appreciate.

Gameplay

-Fighting Mechanics: The same fighting that made us fall in love with the first game is still present, it has just been tweaked. The characters have undergone some rebalancing and there are some new ways to fight. There are now different “difficulties” such as beginner, which always you to basically mash one button to pull off combos. I’ll stick with the classic mode.

-Modes:

-Story: Yep you guessed it, this is the mode where you get to enjoy the story. But this is a fighting game right, the story can’t be great! Well you are wrong! In fact, compared to it’s predecessor, the story is much more robust and fulfilling. This is not your typical “Who are you?” “Let’s Fight” story line. There is actually plot, crazy I know.

-Training: Self Explanatory

-Arcade: Still the same ole same, fight your way through several characters to win arcade mode. This should be self explanatory but I explained it for the people who are not well versed in the fighting genre.

-Legion: First introduced in Portable, Legion mode sets you on a point to point map. Each of these points have various numbers of characters that you have to fight. After you defeat enemies at said points, you may select one of the characters to add to your legion of characters in order to help you fight more. This is a good thing since after each fight your characters HP does not replenish. A nice, fun, and unique game mode to play.

-Challenge: Complete special tasks and for the different characters in order to complete missions. These are decently fun, I am not personally a fan of these things, but for those who do you will enjoy it.Versus: Standard 1P vs Comp or 1P vs 2P

-Score Attack: Fight in order to rack up a high score and upload the score to leaderboards.

-Network: Play online

-Tutorial: Learn the basics.

Audio:

-Music: The music featured in this game, is fantastic. Theme song is pretty awesome, and can be played duing fights.

-Voice Acting: The voices are the same as before, and they are still great.

Overview: With the addition of a new and robust story, game modes such as Legion finally coming to a console version of this game, and new characters, I can say that this does indeed feel like a solid sequel. This is 2.0 and not 1.6.

Overall:9/10 Amazing. If You are a fan of fighting games, you need to have this one in your collection. If you are a fan of BlazBlue then you really need to have this, they have built upon what made the first one good but made it even better.